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Developments for the Watergate Scandal

In what became known as "the Saturday night massacre," Richardson himself was fired, and so was his deputy William Ruckelshaus. The special prosecutor's office and the office of the attorney general were sealed. Congress began to seriously consider impeaching the president.

In November, 1973, following the revelations about the buzz in the tapes that covered a crucial conversation between Haldeman and Nixon a few days after the break-in, Nixon told a group of newspaper editors that he was not a crook. As revelation followed revelation over the next several months, presidential credibility sagged badly.

The Supreme Court became involved, voting eight to nothing that the president was obligated to turn over tape recordings of all subpoenaed conversations. This led to submission of what became known as "the smoking gun tape," in which "President Nixon is heard directing his aides to demand that the CIA do what it could to shackle the FBI's investigation of Watergate." Members of the House Judiciary Committee, who had been considering impeachment, even Richard Nixon's staunchest Republican supporters, now felt compelled to come out in favor of impeachment. On August 9, 1973, Richard Nixon resigned and his appointed vice president, Gerald R. Ford, a former Michigan congressman and House leader, became president of the United States.

The presidency of Richard Nixon was over, but hardly the speculation about it. For the most part, analysts can only speculate about what Watergate meant to the ordinary citizen at

the time. In Washington, of course, no event was bigger, as one former official remembered, Washington residents remember where they were when they heard about the Saturday night massacre just as a decade earlier most Americans remembered where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot. But, despite deep personal interest throughout the country, most observers agree that the person in the street, the non-W...